DRUNKS
[Spoilers]
A film review by Mike Ryan
Copyright 1995 Mike Ryan
Director: Peter Cohn (debut) A cast of dozens including Richard Lewis, Faye Dunaway, Dianne Wiest, Spalding Gray, Howard Robbins, Christopher Lawford, and George Martin.
This film debuted tonight at the Boston Film Festival, on the heels of a glowing review by the Boston Globe's Jay Carr. I can't concur--I found it a self-conscious actor's movie--pretty much like watching an audition tape.
If you're not afraid of spoilers, here's what happens: There's an AA meeting, at which each member tells their story. Richard Lewis' character goes first, then takes off and goes on a binge. That's it--that is literally the entire movie. There's nothing here but the barest of frameworks for a bunch of (admittedly talented) actors to give their individual interpretations of alcoholism. Each story is told as a monologue, with no connection to the rest of the film, and no relationships developed between characters (wait, that's an exaggeration - two of them did talk for a minute in the women's room). Each actor works in isolation, which makes it impossible to forget for a moment that you're watching actors performing rather than flesh-and-blood characters. You could extract each monologue from the film into a distinct short, and watching neither the short or the film would you ever guess there was anything missing (other than interest).
Plot - non-existent Cinematography - yawn Acting - generally forced and self-conscious, a waste of some talented people (only Spalding Gray seems to know how to make an isolated monologue ring true)
Recommended only for students of acting. -- Mike Ryan Virtuoso Software http://world.std.com/~deeryan/virtuoso.html
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews